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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2011730" data-attributes="member: 172">Monster Geographica: UndergroundMonster Geographica: Underground is a collection of open game content creatures. The book is assembled and edited by Joseph Browning and Suzi Yee (the dynamic duo behind Expeditious Retreat Press, the publisher behind this book) and Kevin Baase, AKA "Boz" of the Creature Catalog site and contributor to the Tome of Horrors. Monster Geographica: Underground is the first of a series, this one with a focus particular on underground creatures.A First LookMonster Geographica: Underground is a 200 page half-sized perfect-bound softcover book priced at $20.00.The art is attributed to Ravindra Rana. There are precisely three pieces of art in the book. Cover is a deep brick red color and features two monochrome pictures: a two headed troll on the front, and a pair of spelunkers of the back. The title page features some cave terrain. The move to save cost and space leaves the inside looking a little sparse, especially for a creature book (which typically rely strongly on images to depict their topic matter.)A Deeper LookMonster Geographica: Underground is a collection of open game content from a variety of sources, edited and updated for 3.5. Many of these creatures were culled from sources with so-called "crippled OGC", i.e., OGC with strategically closed components that make it difficult to reference and reuse the material, usually by closing the name of the item. In these cases, the authors have provided a new name for the creature. So while you may recognize many of these creatures names from books you already own, some will seem more cryptic. Books that this book draws from includes Tome of Horrors, Tome of Horrors II, Minions, Monsters of the Mind, Creature Collections I-III , Liber Bestarius, and Denizens of Avadnu.Which of your favorite creatures have been updated here is a annoying task, which is a testament to why this practice is annoying. But a few potentials I spotted are coal goblins from CCI (under the name soot goblin), stone builder ooze from CCIII (as cone ooze), and spider-eye goblins from CCI (as arachnopygmies). A bit easier is the task of seeing the fully open content creatures, like those from Minions (like deep fey). Of course, many of these books, like CCI and Minions already have updates from their publisher, so going for this solely as a source of updates for those specific books may not be a huge selling point. However, other books, like Tome of Horrors have no such update available.The first thing you may notice while flipping through the book is that creatures are not listed in alphabetical order. What you will notice is that the creature’s order corresponds to a number in the corner, which is the creatures CR. The idea here seems to be that for a given party level, you will be more interested in a creature’s strength than its name. The idea of having a creature’s CR highlighted in the corner was one I saw in Denizens of Avadnu, the idea of ordering them by CR seems new to this book. The creature CRs run from 1/2 to 20, with the selection being a bit sparser at the high end.If you are looking for creatures by name, there is an alphabetical listing of creatures in the front where you would normally find a table of contents, followed closely by a breakdown of creatures by type.Overall, the creatures are an improvement in terms of correctness of stat blocks from the originals. That said, a few minor errors slipped by. The selection is fairly nice, including some interesting entries such as bhuta (blind psionic giants from Monsters of the Mind and deep fey (benign creatures from minions that hasty players may mistake for drow.)In addition to the multitude of monsters in the book, the book is sprinkled with a few "flora and fauna", minor creatures and terrain features appropriate to an underground environment you can drop in to a campaign for flavor. These entries resemble some of the musing in Expeditious Retreat Press’ book A Medieval Society: Ecology and Culture.ConclusionsMonster Geographica: Under is probably of the most use if you don’t presently own many monster books, or wish to see a few updates of creatures. However, you’d be lucky if a particular creature you are interested in appears here.The more pertinent use of the book seems to be if you are simply looking for a book to stock underground areas, particularly the underdark or similar cavernous environment.Overall Grade: B -Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

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